Night will fall - Hitchcock's educational film for the Germans

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Movie
German title Night will fall - Hitchcock's educational film for the Germans
Original title Night Will Fall
Country of production United Kingdom , Israel , United States
original language English , Hebrew , Russian
Publishing year 2014
length 75 minutes
Rod
Director André Singer
script Lynette Singer
production Sally Angel,
Brett Ratner
music Nicholas Singer
camera Richard Blanshard
cut Arik Leibovitch,
Stephen Miller

Night will fall - Hitchcock's educational film for the Germans (original title Night Will Fall ) is a documentary film from 2014 about a film project of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), which remained unfinished in 1945, about the Nazi crimes in the concentration camps , especially the camps Bergen-Belsen , Auschwitz , Dachau and Ebensee should represent.

history

It is based on film material produced by Allied camera teams when the camps were liberated in April 1945. As part of the German Concentration Camps Factual Survey project , led by Sidney Bernstein , a documentation of German atrocities was to be created in London in 1945 in order to present them to the German population and German prisoners of war. Well-known directors and producers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder were brought in for the editing . The project remained unfinished because the priorities of the British authorities had shifted from denazification to working with Germans.

Individual film clips were used as evidence during the war crimes trials in Hanover and Nuremberg.

After the material had been considered lost for a long time, it was restored and updated in 2014 and the history of its origins added.

content

The film begins with the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . The camp commander Josef Kramer and other guards are arrested as prisoners of war . The German SS and Hungarian guards are used to bury the 30,000 dead prisoners. Soviet recordings from the Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps were also used in the original film (e.g. hair and glasses of the murdered). The finds after the liberation of the concentration camps in Poland are shown. In addition, interviews are being held with survivors of the camps: Mania Salinger (née Tenenbaum), Anita Lasker-Wallfisch , Eva Mozes Kor , Vera Kriegel, Tomy Shacham (née Schwarz) and Branko Lustig , producer of Schindler's List . Lustig describes listening to the Scottish Brigade's bagpipe music. Since he was closer to death than to life , he thought it was angel music .

Kor and Kriegel had been victims of twin research by concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele , and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch had to play in the girls' orchestra at Auschwitz .

Photos of the liberation of the Buchenwald , Dachau and Ebensee concentration camps , a satellite camp of the Mauthausen concentration camp , are also shown. B. contrasted with the local climatic health resort, the first American color photos not used in the film with black and white photos from the same location. Eisenhower's visit with delegations of parliamentarians and journalists. The former artillery officer Leonard Berney on the medical care of the former prisoners (after the first few weeks he headed the DP Camp Panzer Barracks in Hohne ).

An interview with Alfred Hitchcock describing Bernstein's work on the film is also shown.

Prices

In addition to several nominations, A. Singer received the

  • Jerusalem Film Festival 2014 an Honorable Mention at the Jewish Experience Award - The Avner Shalev Yad Vashem Chairman's Award
  • Sheffield International Documentary Festival 2014 a special mention

Others

The film title "Night Will Fall" was chosen from the film script of the last scene of the original 1945 film. There it says in a sense: "Darkness comes over humanity" if the world does not draw any lessons from these images.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ German Concentration Camps Factual Survey on the Imperial War Museum website
  2. article in the Guardian (Engl.)